Nikon has launched a site to showcase the touchscreen on a new Coolpix camera and it lets you scroll and zoom through image galleries by moving fingers in front of your webcam -- a gestural interface of sorts. Only it's a bit wonky (or maybe it's my cam), and if you position your mouth inside the "zoom" circle, you can zoom in by smiling and zoom out by pursing your lips. I bet it's a feature and not a bug, too.

In its predictable "Do-It-Yourself Super Ads" piece, NY Times writes about the effectiveness of home-brewed Super Bowl spots:

"Be afraid, Madison Avenue. Be very afraid. That seems to be the message in the aftermath of the crowded, frenetic advertising bowl that took place inside Super Bowl XLIV on Sunday. Among those commercials consistently deemed most effective, memorable and talked-about, many were created or suggested by consumers — or produced internally by the sponsors — rather than the work of agency professionals."

Exhibit A: Doritos' "House Rules". Exhibit B: Doritos' "Underdog". According to the paper, both spots did well in a variety of surveys and polls. The obligatory soundbite illustrates the teaching moment: "Consumers seem to know best what other consumers will like to watch in the "unique" ad environment of the Super Bowl."

There are a lot of things agencies should be worrying about -- like, what happens if clients start budgeting $200 for spot production after reading the Times. Or that there's a lot of great talent outside of the usual ad hubs hungry for a piece of the pie. Or that they aren't hiring these guys as freelancers or contractors. But the whole "random consumers are taking over Mad Ave" myth isn't one of them.

Flashback: in a 2007 story on the same subject, a different Times reporter wrote: "Ad agencies and brand marketers are still doing much of the legwork. Heinz and Doritos spent months planning their user-generated contests, hiring lawyers to vet them and designing advertisements to promote them. Then they assigned employees to wade through entries."

Hats off to whoever came up with this: an ad for the Dante's Inferno game (launches today) done in ASCII and hidden in Digg's source code. Similar images were also placed on a few other sites. Each ad contains a password; collect all of them and enter them at hellisnigh.com (currently down) for something -- which obviously can't be very good for the humankind -- to happen.

There's no point in this post other than general amusement, but I saw my first "testers wanted" banner ad today and got inspired to gather screenshots of nine different sites promising a free - FREE! - iPad after you buy a bunch of other stuff. Look, the top one uses a totally fake mock-up of the device (but throws in a FedEx cargo plane).